Keyword research is an essential tool. It gives you the opportunity to discover and research particular search terms which people specifically enter into the search engines when submitting any kind of search for information, products or services. This is extremely useful for optimising websites, because if you know what people are trying to find, then you can easily structure your site and its content so that the search engines index your chosen keywords. This will tip the scales in your favour when it comes to driving targeted traffic toward your website. It’s not overly complex, and there are several really easy to use applications available to help you pursue this sort of research.
As a virtual assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own sites, and it’s also more than likely that several of your clients will ask you to carry out research for them too. If you find that you’re doing keyword search regularly, then you may want to think about investing in a program that will automate some of the time consuming stages for you. However, keep in mind that you should always understand how to do it without additional software assistance, as these programmes certainly aren’t foolproof, and it’s always a responsible practice to occasionally verify the results too.
Here’s a quick guide on how to do a keyword search with Google:
1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.
2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for – in this case I am using “Virtual Assistant“, then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.
3. You will be presented with a detailed list of potential keywords and similar keywords from the initial keyword that you inserted.
4. As you can clearly see, the application has given us a list which I have itemised by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We’re looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we take a look at this list, an exellent target is to choose a keyword with not less 100 searches a day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still rather significant, but if we now move over to Google, we can check out our possible competition.
5. So, let’s do a search on “Virtual Assistant Services”, and make sure you use the quotations marks or you’ll get results returned for any combination of those words.
At this point, as you can clearly see, this page shows us that there are (at the time this article was written) 57,700 pages ranked for this particular combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.
I’m not saying that this is the ideal term for you to attempt to rank your Virtual Assistant business. This is just an example of what you may want to check out. Be creative and ‘think outside the box’ with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.
